Sweet Streets

Sweet streets swept clean by the dancing feathered heels of
     long-legged girls in lace and lipstick and serpents coiled in their
          timeless hair,
Sweet last look she scars you with as she holds you through
     the train’s cloudy coach window where in a finger smudged
          script read the words: TREES ARE PEOPLE TOO,
Sweet are the colors in their clothes dull earth tones orange
     as a setting sun cerulean blue skies and the hot reds of
          fires that burn below the ground,
Sweet sex on parade in the click click of their pointed shoes
     billowing dust storms on the floorboards and the long white
          fingers smoking pistols on those razor-edge hips,
Sweet sex in the silence between twirling hemlines and the
     softly clapping hands of an invisible audience overrun with
          ghosts and the empty forms ghosts refuse to haunt,

So Heaven did not descend quickly enough to save you,

And my arms were never strong enough to hold you,

Every face is some perverse memory begging you to trip
     and fall again,

Sweet snare suffocating you in the mistakes of your past but
     wearing the coy smile of the very GOTdamn golden bullet that
          reaped havoc in your heart and made you broken forever.

4.7.2012

The Road's Conclusion

An old poem from the open road, when I had just arrived in Denver and was exploring the place...

For one final time, I closed Jack's book on

the auditorium floor next to the stage waiting for Dylan.

I fled New York for Denver following the footsteps of Paradise,

not knowing the road beneath me was the original beat home.

And there I was alone in my fascination of

the newly discovered musical vibe around me,

opened to me by my lonely quest for miles

that led me to sit at the feet of a rock and roll legend.

What was this need to be impressed?

I was caught in the illusion,

swaying to the rhythmical current of the crowd all

lost in the sounds that were alive to me for the first time,

out on those same streets,

the inner workings of a magnet that Jack surely felt too,

finding Denver a stop-over that could not be avoided in

the long list of American wonder.

We all wanted to dig this place, yet up until now,

the only digging I had known was Seamus Heaney's.

Jack taught me the confinement of that dream.

I finished his book and woke up realizing

that Bob Dylan was a real human.

4.12.05

Pink Dolphins

I found you floating face up
In the brown curling jungle river
With a broken heart
Taking on water
Leeches in your eyes
The current lapping waves onto the islands
     of your pale breasts
You told me I could follow the stars
That their trails would take me home
But every star is where I came from
Every star is where I’m going
Tiny grey black-eyed perch kissing your skin
     where my own lips used to rest
Tan lines on your hips
Tiny wrinkles on your toes
My limbs wrapped in wet clothes like a new flesh
Draped over my hollow bones
Protecting the water inside of me from the water without
I wonder what you’ll see on the river tonight
When the world floats by in greens and sprinkles of stars
Conversations with pink dolphins
Comparing labia
As they sing shrill songs lamenting better days downstream
I call your name from the bridge
My voice a scream
An echo
Nonsense in the still darkness
Life must go on, you say
Ignoring my attempts to retrieve you
As your long hair swarms slow motion about your peculiar face
Life must go on
And I must forget you
Ten thousand jungle noises drown my reply
Invisible hands pull you away from me
Always slightly stronger than whatever I can muster
The Pirarucu whispers in your ear
It’s time to go
The Jaguar, always watching, drinks from a pool at your throat
Don’t leave me like this, I say
But without another word you fade into the muddy river
To become silt and sand
To eventually empty into an enormous lonely sea
I am left forever with the image of your long nipples
     slipping beneath the surface
Like duel periscopes
3.9.2012